Talk:Negative calorie food

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[edit] This has got to be BS

Most of the foods on this list are probably not truly negative calorie. Eat 5 pounds of food from this list every day and see what happens to your waistline. 71.254.209.246 (talk) 02:32, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Why this is not correct and how the mistake came about

This misunderstanding happens because there are two different kinds of calories: A gram calorie is approximately the amount of energy needed to increase the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. A kilogram calorie is approximately the amount of energy needed to increase the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.

This misunderstanding happens because people measure the energy content in food as kilogram calories, but calculate the energy needed to digest the food as gram calories, then compare these two values without realising they are actually measured in different units.


One kilogram of celery contains only 120 kilogram calories, and is mostly water.

If you were to eat an entire kilogram of cool celery out of the fridge at only 7 degrees, It would take about 30 kilogram calories of energy to raise the celery to about body temperature, 37 degrees.

This is only about a quarter of the calories in the celery.

However this is not the only problem with this theory.

There is no evidence presented to show that eating cold food will result in an increase in your metabolic rate to keep body temperature constant, and if this does not happen, it is not correct to equate heat absorbed by food, with energy consumed by the body. This situation is exactly analogous to suggesting cold showers as a weight loss method. mathew (talk) 10:42, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The fatal explosiveness of celery?

When you drink 8 - 8oz cups of cold water, your body uses about 70 calories to raise the temperature of that water. The calorie content of 110g of celery is 18 (105g of that being water).

So if drinking 1814g of cold water burns 70 calories then drinking 105g means you burn... Someone help with the math. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Verstandlich (talk • contribs) 00:02, August 21, 2007 (UTC).

I really like your direction (too much, as we'll see) but so far we're extremely wet. 1814g of water is around one-half gallon! (At 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees C), it occupies 0.479 gal.; 1 US gallon = 3785mL; mass of pure water is 1g/mL at 4C = 39.2 degrees F.)
[Actual readers may simply skip to the last paragraph for my official answer, wherein I reveal the question & answer were meaningless, yet the subject is catastrophic for mankind.]
Right. On Earth an 8oz cup (0.0625 gal. or 236.59mL) holds just 236.59 grams of 'cold' 39-degree water.
And you say drinking that will make your body burn 70 Calories, eh? I have no idea, let's see. Working back from a body temp of around 98.6F, negative 70 food Calories would unheat 1000g of water by 70C or by 126F. I'm getting nervous about visiting your cafe now! It seems that removing the 70 kCal the body added . . . cools the 8-ounce cup of water . . . by 296.9C or by 532.6 degrees Fahrenheit . . . meaning it must have started out incredibly frozen at -259 Centigrade or -434 degrees Fahrenheit -- just above absolute zero!
So if the body really spends 70 Calories to heat up a cup of ice water, wouldn't it become absolutely scalding?

Thats 70 Calories for 8 cups.


I don't know if I'm right but this is all very important for seeing if munching ice cubes burns enough calories to justify all the dental work. . .
(If I am somehow correct I am amazed how much energy goes into powering a person for 24 hours on a 2000-Calorie diet. Of course a 150-pound customer has the mass of around 300 cups of Beverage X.)
I'm not going to touch your piece of celery just yet, not until someone provides confirmation and insurance. Given the 18 Calories, we need to check just how flammable the damn stuff can become.
OH, WAIT, you said EIGHT 8-oz cups of water? That's 1893g so you really DO mean about a half-gallon? A full day's supply of beverages. So I'm not crazy but I really "totalled" your example didn't I.
(REWIND) "And you say drinking that will make your body burn 70 Calories, eh? Working back from a body temp of around 98.6F, negative 70 food Calories would unheat 1000g of water by 70C or by 126F." Where do you keep the creamer? Oh thanks, what a fine cafe you've got! "It seems that removing the 70 kCal the body added . . . cools the HALF GALLON of water" . . . by a lovely 36.98C or by 66.57 degrees Fahrenheit . . . meaning it must have started out at 32.03 Fahrenheit as, well, ice. Your example was perfectly rigged all along and we didn't know!
So yes, it seems that if you "drink" your BUCKET of stealth ice cubes, it may just save you some of those trips to the plastic surgeon for gut reduction.
What now of the celery? First, I trust this is FROZEN celery or your example was even more whacked than my first analysis. Second, you will eventually "drink" 105g of water after prying it out of the celery if celery is 95% ice as you suggest. That is around 3.55 fluid ounces of frozen water to heat up, and your body burns 3.88 Calories to recover from the chill. (Maybe more if we count any waste heat you lose though your skin/lungs/etc. since your slightly raised metabolism can't be 100% channeled into just the celery-water; but your "70 Calorie" tidbit didn't specify whether this was considered or not.)
SO the answer to your original question is "3.88 Calories" (or 4.05 by simple ratio), but this has almost nothing to do with celery. (Maybe I should have just answered you in the first place? But you asked for math!) Dangerously, the Celery Question totally bogs down the human mind from here on out. HOW much work did it take to get the water out of it? HOW much work does it take to extract any useful chemical energy? DOES the 18 calories include that or not? We know nothing! Only that a half cup of frozen water takes around 4 calories to warm to body temperature. Where is my antidepressant? Celery be damned. It takes far more energy TO THINK ABOUT than you could ever get from eating it. That must be the real secret. This is why the studies can never be done. The researchers would be ruined. "The Celery Death" it's called. --Parsiferon 00:22, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the number. So in the end it's pointless to try to lose weight with this "diet". 4 calories? haha...

[edit] Actual Facts requested (healthy conspiracy alleged)

So whats some good facts to use to debunk this myth?

Does an apple burn more calories to digest than actual calories contained within the apple?

I can't stand people who believe this crap, its like the religious right!

Negative calorie diet is probably a trick into getting us to eat more fruits, leaf vegetables and a good diet. the foodstuffs included in this diet has already been included on the health pyramid as one of the important ones. so it doesn't hurt to eat them. I must have lost a few kilos to these fruits and vegetables though i didn't keep an exact track of the servings etc.--Idleguy June 28, 2005 07:07 (UTC)


according to this article i learn that all foods require the same amount of energy to digest, so to make it take more energy to burn them, i just need to eat low-calorie foods. no? mickey 03:33, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

yeah. pretty much. but it's not just any low cal food but low cal veggies and fruits etc. Idleguy 04:23, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Where did the whole notion arise? Is it true of celery at least?

I want to know where this notion originated so I can be more sure that this is a myth. Is it the calorie/kilocalorie (calorie vs Calorie) confusion? That was alluded to but it wasn't clear to me.

I don't know about all the foods listed, but I've never seen any facts to disprove the celery one. Even snopes seems to think it's true. snopes. If you have a hard time believing that you can loose calories from eating something, consider water. It has zero calories, and your body has to at the very least warm it up (unless your urine is cold?). Skepticism is good, but it's just as annoying as those "religious right" people when you start to declare everything false. :D --Capi crimm 09:31, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article needs NPOV and fact-checking

Questions: How prevalent is this fad diet? The article needs further npov-ing and factual improvement, clarifying what foods actually do provide no net energy. Clearly some foods are zero-calorie, for instance, most dill pickles (American sense; unsweetened pickled cucumbers). But most of the things on this list are quite ludicrous. An apple can contain 80-110 Calories, a single cup of blueberries has over 80. A large wedge of cantaloupe has about 30. That's a significant amount of energy, in a sugary, easily-digestible form. NTK 14:04, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] It's as false as any other diet, but an invaluable resource for many people.

Carb free diets aren't healthy,

Negative calorie diets and foods do have research behind them, and for many people and our lifestyles this information is useful. Even if the name is not 100% accurate. Just because you don't like us or our lifestyles, which some would rather see as a disease, that is no reason to remove this valuable information. Studies about negative calorie foods are referenced below.

Verbatim reproduction of article removed (and my comments) when I realised this was pure cut and paste copyvio. The original of the article that was copied can be found here: Negative Calorie Foods (Personal Trainer Today website). --Seejyb 22:44, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

The point of the negative calorie idea isn't that some foods take away from your caloric intake, it is that the digestion of the foods takes more calories than are provided by the food.



I want to know where this notion originated so I can be more sure that this is a myth. Is it the calorie/kilocalorie (calorie vs Calorie) confusion? That was alluded to but it wasn't clear to me.

An author of this wiki mentions calories and kilocalories (Calories) as if they are related to the negative calorie diet, but in manners of the body, the latter is generally exclusively used. If we say it takes 10 additional calories to digest a serving of celery that has 5 calories, then we are talking about "food calories" (kilocalories/Calories) in both instances. I suggest mention of the "small calories" (1/1000 of a food calorie) be removed per its irrelevance.

Quiteokay 07:51, 11 April 2007 (UTC)


This diet is completely bogus in my eyes. First of all, why are there so many fruits listed on the page? Doesn't the author know that fruits contain sugar, and therefore cannot possibly be a "negative calorie" food? Secondly, there seems to be no science behind this theory. Metabolism is quite relative to each person. If someone starts to starve their body, the body, in turn, will attempt to adapt, and therefore their metabolism will drop. This means that if you don't eat adequate amounts of calories then your body will start to function using minimal energy. This means that even foods that in the past were "negative calorie" may begin to accumulate calories in your body. Furthermore, I don't really understand what this diet entails. For any diet to be legitimate, there needs to be some sort of guideline, which this article has none. Is this diet supposed to be about eating only lettuce and celery for the rest of your life? It lists of bunch of fruits and vegetables, so wouldn't that just be the same as a vegetarian diet? What makes this diet different? What exactly does this diet do? Is this diet all about starvation? And if so, wouldn't the people following this be considered having an eating disorder? Shu ster 18:19, 28 June 2007 (UTC)


Just thought I'd point out that if you are making a fuss over this, you are probably not getting enough fiber in your diet...All the things on that list are good sources of fiber.

Some people are just so focused on things like counting calories they forgot to see the big pictures...or maybe never have. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Aliabadi (talk • contribs) 23:17, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wasted water math?

I see several parts of this discussion that try to calculate how many calories and kilocalories are in celery versus how many it takes to warm celery to body temperature. These are used as arguments to disprove the "negative calorie" foods idea. This amount of energy is very small compared to how much energy the body wasted trying to digest the dietary fiber in celery. Even eating celery that is warmed to body temperature will cause the body to go through the whole digestive process, spending energy on all the muscles involved and getting nothing but a small amount of extracted water and the digestive cleansing benefit of fiber. I definitely agree with questioning some of the fruits on this list, which I would think are high in sugar. Some of the fruits listed are very sweet and the body can absorb much of the sugar while passing the indigestible fiber parts. Are there any scientific-minded dietitians out there that can help with this? I understand how this all works but lack real scientific data on a per-food basis. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.73.101.31 (talk) 22:56, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Celery appears twice?

//While low nutrient, high cellulose foods such as celery may consume slightly more energy to digest than absorbed, the difference is of negligible consequence metabolically. Limiting a diet to such foods over an extended time could lead to malnutrition. True "negative calorie foods" are rare, and limited to fibrous vegetables like celery and relatively indigestible items like grass, paper, or cardboard.//

SO celery is both a good and bad food? These sentences seem to contradict themselves. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.223.96.135 (talk) 19:02, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't boil down to good and bad. Celery has very low calorie density. Because of this it consumes a lot of energy in digestion relative to how much nutrition is absorbed from it and thus, could lead to malnutrition if eaten exclusively. That's not contradictory at all. Duien (talk) 01:48, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] world's most fattening food?

If the post at the top were true:

a) celery would be the world's most fattening food, since it provides around 1000 times more energy than it takes to digest, and

b) biologists would need to rewrite their entire understanding of life, since according to "Compoundeye"/Matthew we do not require food energy to regulate body temperature —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.85.90.200 (talk) 03:58, 12 December 2007 (UTC)